Technical Background
The format dates back to the early days of business computing and is widely used to pass data between computers with different internal word sizes, data formatting needs, and so forth. For this reason, CSV files are common on all computer platforms.
CSV is a delimited text file that uses a comma to separate values (many implementations of CSV import/export tools allow other separators to be used). Simple CSV implementations may prohibit field values that contain a comma or other special characters such as newlines. More sophisticated CSV implementations permit them, often by requiring " (double quote) characters around values that contain reserved characters (such as commas, double quotes, or less commonly, newlines). Embedded double quote characters may then be represented by a pair of consecutive double quotes(Creativyst 2010), or by prefixing an escape character such as a backslash (for example in Sybase Central).
In computer science terms, a CSV file may be considered a "flat file".
Read more about this topic: Comma-separated Values
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